This information age make everything seem easy for everyone to go shop for places to buy and rent houses without having to be on site physically, but beware, there are transactions like these that could fall into scams.
There have already been reports and real life experiences from people and once real estate expert Tarek el Moussa gave some advice how to avoid scam that not only preys the tenants but also the landlords.
First, he taught people to be aware of the Out-of-Town Landlords. It may seem easy to communicate with any stranger online and over the phone but if you found a property that you like online. Insist that you have an ocular visit of the place first with the landlord. Why? There are posers, who would just simply say they are out of town and so you can just send them security payment to have the place reserved for you, but this may not be true. You will not be happy if you've already sent the money and found out later on that the house isn't theirs and it isn't for rent at all.
The next one we can be most careful of, Moussa, said is that if one day we found a really nice and popular property up for rent, without checking up on the place physically, but already wired out payments for the house to be ours. This could be a red flag, because there were a few incident where several people who do not know each other paid one landlord, in the end they found out, they are not the only ones moving to the new place but the landlord is not in sight.
There are also cases of prospective tenants who said they already made a check payment deposited to the bank, before even asking the landlord the real price of the rent. After finding out they would claim they paid too much and would make a request to the landlord to return the difference, and when he does even before the check cleared, the check that was paid to him bounced. So in connection with this landlords, do not do anything with check payments until they have been cleared first.
To report rental scams in your area you can visit rentalscams.org.